Under Cover of Darkness

by Julie E. Czerneda

  The young officer kicked herself clear of the coverlet and snatched up the dressing robe hung by the bed. Stunned by the shocking break from strict form, she blurted, “Don’t tell me our worst fear has happened?”

  The old woman clamped her jaw with reproof. But she answered. “Yes.”

  Ugly news was given no instant to settle.

  “Enjoy breakfast, sweetheart. Then be on your way. Your tab’s been squared as a gift from a relative, and your officer’s dispatch is already packeted from WorldFleet hub’s relay. You’ll be on active duty inside an hour. Even your high security clearance won’t give that the balance of power is broken.”

  No more dared be said. The senior initiate bowed herself out, reverted to matronly character.

  As Jessian, she dressed, unnerved as though hit by an ice-water dousing. Already, the horrific nightmare began. Brilliant, irascible Calum Quaide Kincaid had made no idle threat, when his private research team had been bullied by lies, and then commandeered under mandate. Before letting their break-through concepts become the snatched prize of corrupted politics, the scientist sold out. Tossed his lifework, and that of his six genius colleagues to the volatile, underdog fringes. Applied as a weapon, their explosive new leap in development would swiftly upset impossible odds. Rip apart the blood-sucking, stalemated war that had raged for decades between PanTac Trade, and two rival empires of conglomerate governments.

  Shattered by dread, Jessian crossed the quaint floor tiles and snatched on her discarded clothing. The wafted fragrance of the rich food hit raw terror, and unsettled her stomach. She sat, fingers shoved through her stubble of hair, while anxiety trampled her, roughshod. Whole worlds would see ruin. The covenant of compassion that founded her order must intervene now, before entire civilizations went down in fury and flames.

  “Save us all from ourselves!” Trembling, Jessian unfolded the napkin. She accessed the message embedded on flash-sheet: time and location to make her rendezvous with the sister-initiate named as her contact. She would receive no further instructions until after her drop onto Scathac.

  She went, wide awake to the personal danger imposed on her WorldFleet persona; and idealistically, fatally blind to the impact her choices might stamp on the future.

  Scathac was a mottled mudball from orbit, gleaming with pockets of bitter water, clouded to opal by alkali tailings. Groundside, the planet was a brutalized wasteland. Worse than back country primitive, barely more than a dusty supply depot upkept to service the enclaves of miners that canyoned its surface.

  At noon, local time, the dirt streets were empty. As Cultural Branch Officer Susan MacTavish, she strode through the huddle of prefab buildings, coated and drab under powdery dust, and snagged hoary with air-feeding lichens. The verges were scattered with thorny plants. Also rustling fauna with venomous barbs, scaled hides, and murderous teeth.

  Hands protectively gloved, she snapped back her helmet’s dark-tinted faceplate and squinted through UV- laced glare. The view redefined the concept for desolate: WorldFleet was raping this world for its minerals, essential for the outer skin shielding that armored all star-faring ships. The irony scalded: that each gaping scar on this savaged landscape was covetously defended as a military asset.

  Noon sun drove the base residents inside. Nothing moved in the bleak, punch-cut shadows. Past the slab-sided warehouses, beyond gravel flats sculpted to ridges, the cones of a broken, volcanic range notched the heat shimmers at the horizon. Tribal folk lived there, a feat of stark resilience that defied imagination. Stymied reason, in fact, since WorldFleet brass now pitched their brightest young talent to crack their crazed pocket of local resistance. Scathac’s pack of primitives actually thought they could beat a PanTac mandate of enforced eviction.

  “Sane people don’t commit cultural suicide!” the special-ops officer blurted aloud. What fanatical sect would trade their lives for a forsaken, mass grave in this place?

  “Believe it, Jessian,” a cautious, unaccented voice answered her explosive thought. The sisterhood contact she waited to meet emerged out of shadow, wearing a reflective jumpsuit and a grimed head cloth, apparently native. “Never underestimate the tenacity of the human spirit.”

  “I don’t, usually.” MacTavish, now Jessian, regarded her sister-initiate with a dissectingly measuring stare. “You’re Adrianna?” Given a nod, she resumed with dry venom, “Even on paper, this bunch seems extreme.”

  “Worse, actually.” The contact’s anxious glance flicked aside. “I learned the hard way. If you can’t find the opening to mend my mistakes, these people will die without leaving a trace.”

  Jessian stiffened. “Our order would spare them?”

  “That’s your mission, my dear. Enjoy the party.” Before hearing more questions, the sister-initiate gestured ahead. “I’ll give you the gist at the Base Port’s bar. That way.”

  Disturbed beyond thought that her secretive sisterhood dared to work her in parallel with WorldFleet’s assigned objective, Jessian strove to sound matter-of-fact. “These oddballs refuse to relocate again. Why? They’ve backed down from morbid conflict, before.” In fact, their erratic history had colonized other worlds, prior to this one. Choice habitats, worthy of taking a stand; not the bare, poisoned vista PanTac’s combined governments had made of this scorched patch of hell.

  “They’ve balked at the formality of refugee processing, then skirmished when WorldFleet stepped in and tried armed coercion. There were casualties. Troops hit bang in the eye with damned darts, and nary a tribal hunter in sight. No one died. But the woundings were ugly enough to force a stand down.” The sisterhood contact glanced sideward, evasive. “A reactionary deadlock, except that appearances don’t pierce the surface. You’ve read what’s on file?”

  “The whole lunatic theme.” A matrilineal band of rugged individualists had chosen this isolate waste to save their culture from sweeping conformity. Another whacked breed of zealot, that decried mechanized technology as boogeyman. Coughing the taint of buffeting, scorched air, clogged with the harsh grit of minerals, Jessian conceded, “One has to admire these settlers for their bloody-minded persistence.” For generations, the killer climate had been deterrent enough to preserve their wonked ethnic lifestyle. Until WorldFleet’s imposed regime of martial law, and wartime demands overran their pioneer rights. The strategic value of Scathac’s rare ores dumped their world on the hot list of enemy targets.

  “I told them straight out that their lives were at risk!” More than defensive, the sister-initiate qualified, “They won’t understand. Refuse to listen. Their entrenched beliefs have no place for the concept their home grounds are no longer safe.”

  “ ‘Ah’ket tens vhehico?’ ” Jessian questioned, ice-water cool.

  A spat oath affirmed the astute guess drawn from hours of linguistic homework. “That’s just what their wizened spokesman declared!” Arms crossed as though chilled, the sister-initiate ran on with the concept’s translation, “ ‘This place is one Word, and all other Words, living, contain the whole Arc of Eternity.’ ”

  “Well, that may have been the going truth yesterday,” Jessian snapped under her breath. She dared not unveil the hideous truth: that overnight, a single, leaping advance outstripped Scathac’s costly defense grids. Kincaid’s weapon would be aimed here first, one blow to cripple PanTac’s monopoly on the light-speed class hulls that made starships. Before the pause lagged, she masked driving worry. “I should have expected the order’s involvement.” Their mission protected minority cultures, and sheltered whole gaggles of at-risk children. “It’s the unwarranted ferocity of WorldFleet’s brass, scrambling, that’s got me pushed to the edge.”

  “You’re officially dispatched to shepherd these ornery tribefolk to safety? As well?”

  Jessian’s scowl gave answer enough. To task her here—a specialist sent in on classified priority to co-opt an obscure batch of nomads—hoisted a glaring red flag:

  by PanTac’s grasping standards, these odd, stone-age people shoul
d have been beneath contempt. Written off as an expendable casualty, along with the working class miners . . .

  The hunch to the sister-initiate’s shoulders all at once sagged with defeat. “You haven’t guessed? Or worse, the order itself hasn’t warned you?”

  “Warned me? What for?” Jessian stared. “WorldFleet command handles PanTac’s dirty ops without oversight. It’s self-serving logic. Genocide makes the short list, for bad press.”

  The contact gave that glossing over short shrift. “Don’t fall for appearances. No one’s launching this rescue for the humanitarian spin.”

  Jessian stopped, speechless. “The stake’s raw intelligence? On both sides? You’re twisting my leg!”

  The headcloth’s weave fluttered as the sister-initiate shuddered with outright unease. “Esoteric knowledge,” she whispered, afraid in the open street. “Magic. These tribefolk possess the ability to evoke the paranormal. Miners’ gossip on that has run rampant for years. Strange encounters nobody wants on the record, but prospectors’ probes get knocked clean out of orbit. Personnel and machinery have been wiped off the grid by inexplicable, unseen forces. I’m not the only one standing who’s witnessed the eerie proof.”

  Save us all! Jessian snapped down her faceplate to mask her sudden alarm. Elite training and the order’s strict discipline kept her outward conclusion flat calm. “Then my official assignment hasn’t been driven by PanTac’s overweening hypocrisy.”

  The sister-initiate shook her head, still rattled beyond decorum. “I won’t go back out there. Unless your trained talent ranks higher than mine, you’ll be royally cooked if you try. I tell you, those uncanny creatures are too reclusively savage to tame.”

  Which surely meant WorldFleet desired them alive as a clandestine research experiment, Jessian raged behind her dark visor. Kincaid’s vengeful defection made Scathac’s fey tribefolk far more than a weird curiosity. Surely, they sparked someone’s desperate hope that their mystical powers might offer a last-minute countermeasure. The snagging crux loomed, that the sisterhood’s precepts would demand her outright intervention to spare a free people from rank exploitation.

  The terrible speed of unfolding events permitted no chance to prevaricate. Entrained in two roles, the young woman charged to pursue an uncataloged culture paced as she dictated her needs. Up and down base supply’s dingy office, her tigerish tread shed caged energy.

  “Compass, with satellite tracking. Topographical charts. Yes! On paper!” she snapped to the middle-aged loser wedged behind his chipped desk. “Boots,” she continued, annoyed by his raised eyebrows and posture of inert complacency. He and his staff would be dead as dust, if WorldFleet’s intelligence failed to deliver. Boots; she chided herself, inwardly driven to resume her lapsed concentration. “Ones with miner’s soles. An ore prospector’s outfit and field kit.”

  The desk jockey rode over her, heedless of rank; oblivious to looming ruin. “You can’t be crossing this terrain on foot!”

  “Hostile, is it?” The steel glare Jessian whetted for bureaucrats cut his protest off at the knees. “Walking. I’ve said so. The tribefolk do likewise. In flimsy rope sandals. They travel that way all their miserable lives, and no fool’s about to earn their respect, invading their turf with a skimmer.”

  “Damned stupid, if you think to be messing with them.” The man rubbed his pink forehead, his jaw nestled into his creased neck like a turtle. “They’ll turn your head. Spin waking nightmares or set your compass drifting in circles.” Each resentful stab at his keypad rapped through her clockwork steps.

  “Emergency rockets,” she stated.

  While she circled, he snapped in contempt, “Shall I add a tent shelter? Survival rations? Wristband with a button locator? The prospectors wear dogtags, as well as a pin beacon lodged in their bone marrow.”

  “All those things. Yes, on the locator. No beacon.” Her voice sounded crisp, despite chafing dread. Her talented resource outmatched his technology. If she fell to mishap, no party of searchers would be sifting through Scathac’s ashes to find her remains.

  “Won’t matter anyhow,” the requisition man sniffed. “Idiots who tangle with wandering tribefolk tend to vanish without any trace.” His leering glance swept her whipcord-lean frame, with its downplayed, even delicate, femininity. “I’m under your orders. Ignore smart advice, it won’t be my balls strung up for getting you lost. Shall I put you down for the hovercraft’s route? That’s if you’re the brass bitch to the bone, determined to leave in the morning.”

  His victim smiled, a flash of bared teeth. “I leave tonight. Since I’ve ordered the clothes, I might as well ride with the resupply for the miners.”

  “You’re sweet flesh, to those sharks,” came his last, parting jab. “That crowd of roughnecks aren’t gonna balk at snatching the opportune pinch.”

  Jessian froze. Her slate-colored eyes kept their bite through charged quiet. “Will they so?” Then her brazen façade cracked. “Bring them on, let them try.” Still cheerful, she laughed. “What earthly use is a fully grown stud who flirts like a beardless virgin?”

  Sunset glared like a huge, bloodshot eye above blackened peaks of vertical rock. As hardened as her promise, Jessian swayed to the lurch of the next outbound crawler. She traveled masked in a working man’s head-cloth, jounced as the vehicle’s treads scraped across scoured hardpan. Out-country, the jagged, solidified lava would have torn balloon tires to shreds. The burly miners wedged on either side offered her no harassment. Their sunken expressions reflected bored stupor, never due to her military status.

  A sister-initiate sworn in for raw talent, Jessian had been schooled to project her focused power of suggestion. To uninformed senses, a person was present, but not interpreted as a female. The miners perceived what her clothing implied: another gaunt prospector, bound into the waste for a routine ground survey.

  The reweaving of esoteric energy sealed Jessian inside of a tight ring of solitude. Confined by the arduous grind of the crawler, she had too much time to dwell on her endangerment, now the secret demands of the sisterhood entangled with her career. Both factions wanted a closed, tribal culture removed to secure its survival.

  Unless she failed outright and opted for suicide, she must decide which of two powerful factions her operative choice would betray.

  WorldFleet, panicked and snatching at straws to close its breached line of defense; or the sisterhood, which also pursued arcane practice, and whose philanthropical service to civilized humanity was already taxed to the bittermost edge. Hung at the verge of annihilating warfare, uncounted billions were poised to die. If Jessian openly chose for the order, the high-profile scandal of her defection would fling their hidden covenant headlong into the predatory arena of politics. An imperative, justifiable breach of held trust, given that reason must argue for mercy: those peaceful regimes granted the sisterhood’s backing perhaps stood a chance to endure through the fragmenting turmoil.

  Hands clenched, Jessian coughed out the alkali dust stirred by the stiffening breeze. Scathac’s days were inferno; the cruel nights, yet more murderous as the temperature plunged toward the other extreme. Unlike these rough men, aware of no worse than their next brutal work shift, the young woman poised on the razor’s edge wrestled her outraged nerves.

  Why had she been given the burden of drawing humanity’s line between certain death, and the imperative drive for self-determined survival?

  The crawler’s gears ground. Brakes squealed, and the lumbering vehicle jerked to a stop. The driver waved toward a thorn-studded ravine, that wound toward a bottle-necked canyon. “Better make camp underneath of those rim walls, before the weather beats you to shreds.”

  Jessian nodded, unable to speak over the concussive roar of the engines. She brushed off the miners’ kindly farewells. Half-crushed by her mission, and unwilling to hazard how these separatist shamans might repel yet another outsider’s invasion, she unhooked her safety belt, shouldered her gear, and stepped off into the trackless unknown. Worl
dFleet intelligence gave her eight days before Scathac got blown to oblivion by Kincaid’s radical cohorts.

  The stars blazed down, pinprick cold, on a hostile landscape veiled under darkness. Thorns, shattered rock, and piled hillocks of crushed pumice grated under Jessian’s boots. She carried no light, just the phosphorescent gleam of a hand-compass, with the winking display of the locator’s readout. The clank of the crawler faded away. The sweep of its headlamps vanished behind, eclipsed by the distant outcrops. Gusts roared down off the volcanic heights, bitter and burning with chill. Jessian tucked in her facecloth. Ripped her pant leg again, on a serrated cactus. At each step, she felt as though Scathac itself rejected her trespassing presence. Accosted by the relentless terrain, she wondered how any sentient human dared to give birth and raise children here. Did other eyes see wild beauty where hers perceived nothing but desolate rock and despair? Had she grasped the tortuous ethnic language with enough comprehension to forge understanding?

  By WorldFleet’s tactical directive, she must. Else wider societies than this one must perish without a last hope of reprieve.

  Doubt gnawed, in the shadows. The sisterhood’s covenant itself could be swayed. Before such sweeping peril, even the order’s humanitarian ethics might fail to sustain their firm character. Crisis could ruthlessly pressure the option to bolster their overstretched resource. Jessian quashed her fretting. Reined in the paranoia that out-raced current fact as she stumbled atop the next rise. These tribefolks’ safe harbor must be won, first. Already, her lungs burned. Chalk grit rasped her throat. That asshole at base could have been right to mock her decision to hike. She might wander for days and find no one. Only cold ashes and the stripped bones of killed game, left in long abandoned encampments. These tortuous mazes of crooked ravines could swallow a tribal band whole, even without any arcane tricks to mask themselves from discovery.